You can overcome this problem by adding the parameters to you application.properties file and reverting it before commit. It is a terrible solution that should be tied up and shot with arrows.

Better yet, you can use this dirty little trick to provide your own properties and it works with the Gradle command line.

Let’s say you want to provide your own value to spring.profiles.active, all you need to do is capitalize the letters and change the dots to underscores and Spring Boot will pick up the change.

./gradlew bootRun --spring.profiles.active=dev,hsqldb

does nothing, but

SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=dev,hsqldb ./gradlew bootRun

works like a charm.

The reason this works is that while Gradle won’t pass along system properties to Spring Boot, it does pass along environment variables. Spring Boot is able to pick up the environment variable when it resolves the property and the last ten months of changing property files by hand makes me look like a total and absolute moron.

In Spring Boot, you can use the @ConditionalOnProperty annotation to enable or disable a particular bean based on the presence of a property. This is very useful if you want to provide optional features to your microservice.

To do so, add the annotation either at the class or bean level, as follows